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scholarship on the Miracle of Salzburg: “Ambitious parents who are currently playing the ‘Baby Mozart’ video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard.”

And Tiger?
    Researchers on great performance sometimes call Tiger Woods the Mozart of golf, and the parallels do seem striking. Woods’s father, Earl, was a teacher, specifically a teacher of young men, and he had a lifelong passion for sports. He spent the first half of his career in the army, where, he says, his assignments included teaching military history, tactics, and war games to cadets at the City College of New York. In high school and college (Kansas State) he had been a star baseball player, and in the time between college and the army he would coach Little League teams “and take them to the state tournament,” he wrote in a little-noticed book, Training a Tiger, published shortly before Tiger turned pro. “I love to teach,” he said.
    Earl had plenty of time to teach his son and was intensely focused on doing so. His wife Kultida and their son, Tiger, were Earl’s second family. He had married young and had three children with his first wife, but that marriage ended in divorce. By the time Tiger came along, Earl’s previous children were grown, he had retired from the army, and at age forty-four he was working for McDonnell Douglas in Southern California. He was also fanatical about golf. He had been introduced to the game only a couple of years earlier but had worked extremely hard at it and had achieved a handicap in the low single digits, placing him in the top 10 percent of players. When Tiger was born, Earl wrote, “I had been properly trained and was ready to go. I took over new ground in starting Tiger at an unthinkably early age.”
    So here’s the situation: Tiger is born into the home of an expert golfer and confessed “golf addict” who loves to teach and is eager to begin teaching his new son as soon as possible. Earl’s wife does not work outside the home, and they have no other children; they have decided that “Tiger would be the first priority in our relationship,” Earl wrote. Earl gives Tiger his first metal club, a putter, at the age of seven months. He sets up Tiger’s high chair in the garage, where Earl is hitting balls into a net, and Tiger watches for hours on end. “It was like a movie being run over and over and over for his view,” Earl wrote. Earl develops new techniques for teaching the grip and the putting stroke to a student who cannot yet talk. Before Tiger is two, they are at the golf course playing and practicing regularly.
    Tiger’s prodigious achievements have become well known; he was a local celebrity by the time he reached elementary school and became nationally famous in college. Amid all that has been written about his legend, a couple of facts are especially worth noting. First is the age at which he initially achieved outstanding performance at a level of play involving regular international competition. Let’s call it age nineteen, when he was a member of the U.S. team in Walker Cup play (though he did not win his match). At that point he had been practicing golf with tremendous intensity, first under his father and after age four under professional teachers, for seventeen years.
    Second, neither Tiger nor his father suggested that Tiger came into this world with a gift for golf. Earl did not believe that Tiger was an ordinary kid (but, then, parents hardly ever believe that). He thought Tiger had an unusual ability to understand what he was told and to keep track of numbers even before he could count very high. Tiger has repeatedly credited his father for his success. Trying to understand his early interest in the game, he has not invoked an inborn fascination. Rather, he has written, “golf for me was an apparent attempt to emulate the person I looked up to